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I read a post in an online shoutbox the other day about a "disturbing situation" in Alaska. It seems a bunch of uppity backwoodsmen Inuits had got it into their heads that Evolution was not the only acceptable theory that the school directors and atheists say it is. Thus, they decided not to teach it. Keep in mind that in most, if not all, public schools, evolution is the only theory that can be taught or acknowledged to exist, despite the fact that other theories, with as much evidence behind them, exist and are believed by most of America. Also, please remember that many of these same evolutionists also support the preservation of native cultures, including native religions. These self-righteous atheists proceeded to bash the Inuit school board for not teaching what they considered to be the only acceptable theory. They spouted atheistic propaganda about how "evolution has all the facts to support it" and "Christianity is rubbish" and "this is a disturbing turn of events." Does this seem a bit hypocritical to you?

*Title edited to prevent webfires.*
(I am new to the forum; please tell me if I misstepped or if this has been posted before.)

The topic has a tendency to turn into flamewars rather quickly.

In passing, though, I will note that you are conflating atheists, scientists, and multi-cultural leftists into one monolithic group, which is leading you to make rather wild and unfounded accusations about motives. I'm a member of the first two groups, but most emphatically NOT the third. Many scientists are not a member of -either- of the other groups, and the third group is not synonymous with the first OR second - especially the second.

You are also claiming that there is evidence for other theories of, umm, something or other, which leads me at least to doubt that you know enough about biology to deserve an opinion. Note that evolution is -not- actually a theory of the origin of life (though it does give hints in that direction) but a theory of how existing life changes. Also note that scientific theories have certain requirements to gain that status, but 'lots of people believe it' is not one of them. Lots of people believed the sun went around the earth at one point, too.

And lots of atheists believe the universe came into existence, but they can't tell you what made it do that.

Funny thing is, one requirement for a scientific theory is that it stand up to the evidence. However, evolutionary theory changes every time they find a new fossil which contradicts what they had before, and they still accept it.

Sorry for lumping three groups together; even when they do sound alike when bashing other theories.

omicron1 wrote:
Funny thing is, one requirement for a scientific theory is that it stand up to the evidence. However, evolutionary theory changes every time they find a new fossil which contradicts what they had before, and they still accept it.

No, it doesn't. Don't confuse the overall theory of evolution with the details of which organisms descended from which others. Rearranging the deck chairs on a cruise ship doesn't require that it be sent back to drydock each time.

You appear to be repeating talking points being fed to you by people who are either ignorant of science themselves, or deliberately lying to you. Please give specifics if you are going to criticize how scientists do science.

All right, ignoring the probability of theories, why are they complaining when the Christians do to them as they do to Christians?

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." -- Douglas Adams

Kerry Skydancer wrote:Lots of people believed the earth went around the sun at one point, too.

Um, Kerry? It does go around the sun. Besides the slight variations caused by multi-planet gravity systems, of course.

D'oh! Okay, thanks for catching that. (Why can you -never- catch the dumb mistakes when you're proofreading, eh?)

Kerry Skydancer wrote:D'oh! Okay, thanks for catching that. (Why can you -never- catch the dumb mistakes when you're proofreading, eh?)

Technically? Because your mind sees the words and thinks "Haha, I wrote that, it means ___." But it confuses "___" with what you actually wrote. We spent a whole section in Editing & Proofreading Class talking about that, and trying to learn how to reverse that mental process. Reading out loud is the best way that works for most people.

omicron1 wrote:All right, ignoring the probability of theories, why are they complaining when the Christians do to them as they do to Christians?

Because there is an unsubtle difference between a scientific theory developed by thousands of scientists working over nearly two centuries and 'We don't like it 'cause it disagrees with the Bible!' Among other things, teaching something that no scientist except a crackpot or two accepts in a tax-supported school because a particular -religion- believes it is a violation of the First Amendment (not the spurious 'separation' but an actual Establishment of Religion) and contrary to the beliefs of young-earth creationists, there is no scientific evidence to support their doctrine.

OTOH, I'm quite willing to agree that if you don't want the public schools to teach your kid science, or multiculti BS, or feed them Political Correctness, you should be allowed to send them to whatever school you want and get your kid's share of the school taxes rebated on a tuition voucher. Until that is an actual option, though, I will use the First Amendment to keep religious dogma out of science classes - because it's not fair to people who don't share your (IMO groundless) beliefs to make science class even -less- useful than it often is already.

"No scientist except a crackpot or two" make up 76% of the United States population. That 76%'s taxes fund that school, which then teaches that 76%'s children something according to someone else's theory. Yet when a school teaches children non-Evolutionary theories, it's "Kill them!" Some scientists decide that Christianity is impossible, and proceed to teach that to public school children in abandonment of literally everything else. Funny thing is, evolution is still a theory. Until evolutionists can explain the existence of the universe, it will remain a theory - which I don't believe. And if I happen to be wrong, I don't lose anything. What about if you are wrong?

You don't have to teach a specific religion; just say that there are other options. However, to use the first amendment to feed children anti-religion is just as bad as enforcing a state religion. Unfortunately, some people have begun interpreting "separation of church and state" as "removal of church from the United States."

Kerry Skydancer wrote:no scientist except a crackpot or two

These gentlemen do not look like crackpots to me.

How about this?

(And btw I am in no way condoning anything. Frankly I think that it should be open to the children to decided what the believe in.)

Namrepus221 wrote:Frankly I think that it should be open to the children to decided what the believe in.

To be precise, it should be up to the parents to teach them, and the children must decide whether or not to accept it.

Namrepus221 wrote:

How about this?

(And btw I am in no way condoning anything. Frankly I think that it should be open to the children to decided what the believe in.)

To answer the caption on the picture, hell NO, I wouldn't have invested in their company.

I'm a firm believer that eccentricity has to be EARNED. Be rich *first*. Then grow a beard and look odd.

Or be eccentric somewhere where I'm not.

Hypocritical? Of course! That's the basis of civilization. People can't get along without hypocrasy. It's required. Otherwise, we try to kill each other.

Evolution is plausable if and only if you reject a priori the existance of a creator. Creationism is plausable if and only if you do not reject a priori the existance of a creator.

Creationism requires you to posit a creator. Evolution is what you are stuck with if you refuse to do so, but it's not a very good theory. It requires self organised systems to tend to greater complexity in defiance of entropy. It requires spontaneous generation of life, something we do not observe even in environments like pasteurised milk that should be extremely hospitable to such an event. Because of the constraints of the fossil record it requires an extremely high mutation rate during certain epochs while modern observation indicates that in all but the simplest lifeforms mutations are nearly always detrimental. In short evolution is not the sort of theory that would be held except among crackpots if there was any competing throy that satisfied the available evidence and the axiom that there is no creator. Once you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth. The only question is whether God is impossible or not.

Atarlost wrote:Evolution is plausable if and only if you reject a priori the existance of a creator.

This is actually not so, much to the delight of christian biologists everywhere. Evolution in the narrow sense describes a mechanism by which entities capable of reproduction may undergo non-random change over generations. It does not make any statements about where the first such entities came from. It also does not reject a creator; it merely means that such a being need not guide things every step of the way. Many christians like to think of evolution as part of the way god has set up the world. Of course, a lot of atheists that try to explain the origin of life and sentience will base their efforts on evolution, and try to extrapolate it.

Disclaimer: I am not a biologist, only a physicist.

Concerning what qualifies as a scientific theory: There's a lot of different properties theories tend to have (experimental verification, prediction, and so forth), but the most basic criterion is falsifiability. Any scientific theory must have a point where it says "if you can prove that A happens, this theory is busted." Otherwise people can just go on claiming their theory and the issue will never get settled, independent of how truthful it is.
Belief in an omnipotent god is not falsifiable; such a being does not labor under any restrictions, so no event is unexplainable. That means that independent of its validity, such a claim can never be disproven. As an example, if we had a time machine and could find out that the first life came about by chemical processes with no divine action involved, that would do precisely nothing to disprove the existence of divine beings. Maybe they actually set up chemistry with that precise happening intended (omniscient people are really good plotters).
Before anybody goes "but God does exist," remember that other religions claim their omnipotent gods exist as well (and yours doesn't). Their claims are by nature as undisprovable, so scientifically we must either reject all omnipotent beings or none (what a mess). That is the chief reason why scientists do not accept higher beings in their theories. Science as such makes no statement regarding religion. But many scientists are also atheists, and will naturally argue their views in the way they are most accustomed to - scientifically.

What am I trying to say? Evolution seems to be the best description we know about how species change over time. But if anybody claims that it has religious ramifications, call bullshit on them.

EDIT: In all of that talking, I forgot the most common-sense point - there's nothing wrong with teaching religion - in religion (or philosophy) class. But in a class about science, the prevalent scientific theories should be taught. And evolution is exactly that, the gentlemen mentioned above notwithstanding.

The honest scientist (see above) will defend the best state of research at the current moment, not go beyond the research, and equally rip a new one for those who
1. Wish to shove their religion into the science when the evidence does not support it
2. Wish to shove their anti-religion into the science when the evidence does not support it.

The major problem today, I think, is that the mainstream scientific community in the form of the major journals, grant making institutions, etc. is falling down on the job on number 2. Try to get a paper published on Intelligent Design and you'll find that you have a great deal of professional difficulties for having the temerity to raise the issue. That's a problem.

You certainly can create experiments for Intelligent Design that are falsifiable and otherwise valid scientific experiments. They are not simple or easy to do, nor do they seem cheap. None of those barriers make them invalid. I'm sick to death of people asserting confidently that such experiments cannot be done. From theology, I'm pretty confident in asserting that it's unlikely that they're going to find something but that's not a scientific attitude. Putting a scientist hat on, run your experiments and let's see what the evidence is.

Now as teaching things in high school, evolution should be taught. It should be taught just like the Bohr model of the atom should be taught. It should not be taught like a religious doctrine and commentary that goes beyond the evidence should be ruthlessly stomped into the ground.

Evolution within species is fine. It is obvious that evolution happens within species. However, when you try to turn a cat into a dog, or any other major change, you run into some biological safeguards, which prevent it from being edited farther.
It's like trying to "evolve" an integer into a string.
Yet macroevolutionists will sit there and say that the Sun's rays or somesuch mutate the organism enough to transform it from one species to another. Notwithstanding that most species are not compatible, and they would have to have two separate organisms mutated the exact same way within a short time (years/months/weeks) of each other, and that this would have to carry over to every single species on earth, they have no proof that a species can change to another. No observed animal has changed on the order they are looking for - ever.
Now, considering that they are using today's environment to postulate about what happened yesterday, without having proof of the latter, they still claim that their theory is the only possibility. I'd say it is just as improbable as that of an eternal Creator, if not moreso.

The other problem is, Evolution does not explain one important tenet: existance. If there was no God, where did the universe originate? I have had some people try to deny it by imagining an everlasting perpetual motion machine of a universe, constantly expanding and contracting. I have had these same people, to defend their theory, try to say that the law of entropy should be disregarded. This is not science! This is sticking to a theory which does not, at this time (and for the concievable future), have the evidence needed to ground it in reality.

Reignbow, there I am afraid you are a bit mistaken. You can disprove the presence of some eternal beings by looking at them with a historical viewpoint. Take the old pantheons. These Greek, Roman, Norse, and tribal gods were not the most amiable guys; they tended to smite with fire those who disobeyed them. They continually (if the myths are believed) caused trouble throughout the ancient world, making themselves personally evident to humans. Now, these same gods' temples are in disarray today. Nobody believes in them. Nobody worships them. But these naturally jealous gods haven't gone on a Holy Smiting Spree, have they? We see no evidence of things that would be according to their basic nature, even under provoked circumstances, so it is safe to assume that they don't exist.

Christianity's God, on the other hand, cannot be disproven this way. His publicly-seen miracles were all leading up to one event - the birth of Christ. After that, He seems to have ceased working miracles in public - after all, the purpose of public miracles is to ensure belief, and He had sent His Son to earth, finishing the chain. Now, I am not to be taken as a reliable source concerning God's actions, but some people will take this as a proof that He does not exist. However, I say He still does miracles. I will list several examples. Take them or leave them.
* The oldest son of my pastor was in a sports accident. A heavy member of the other team ran into him, then slammed him against the pavement. He broke several important bones and was in extremely bad condition when he arrived at the hospital. Medical tests showed severe injuries. His body was off-color. But then, after the tests, during which thousands were praying, he got up, his body color normal, and walked from one gurney to another. Subsequent tests showed that he was completely fine, except for appendicitis caused by the force of the blows.

* Another person I knew had been traveling down the highway when a car ran a red light right in front of him. There was no way to avoid a crash. Inexplicably (by normal means), there was no crash. (I don't remember the exact circumstances)

* There was a famous book author whose father was dying (from a serious illness, I believe). He was a child at the time, and he prayed for his father to get better. Then, he (showing faith larger than a mustard seed) announced to the doctor that his father would get better. Lo and behold, he was completely better when the doctor checked a short time later.

There was a recent study touted to show that prayer does not help healing. I agree - prayer for the purpose of testing does not help to heal anyone. There is an interesting verse in the Bible - "do not put the Lord your God to the test." If God were to reveal himself that obviously, belief in anything other than him would become much more difficult. However, another verse states "Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed." God wants Christians who aren't led by circumstance so much as by faith.

omicron1 wrote: Reignbow, there I am afraid you are a bit mistaken. You can disprove the presence of some eternal beings by looking at them with a historical viewpoint. Take the old pantheons. These Greek, Roman, Norse, and tribal gods were not the most amiable guys; they tended to smite with fire those who disobeyed them. They continually (if the myths are believed) caused trouble throughout the ancient world, making themselves personally evident to humans. Now, these same gods' temples are in disarray today. Nobody believes in them. Nobody worships them. But these naturally jealous gods haven't gone on a Holy Smiting Spree, have they? We see no evidence of things that would be according to their basic nature, even under provoked circumstances, so it is safe to assume that they don't exist.

While I follow and agree with your argument, I submit that it does not apply to religions such as christianity. The christian god is omnipotent and omniscient, something that several religions on earth claim, but none of the ones mentioned above (omnipotence and polytheism don't work so well together). The argument above was that the gods did not react in ways expected; under such and such conditions, they surely must take such and such actions. Obviously, this goes against omnipotence. The christian god does not have to do anything; he certainly is not compelled by the expectations of his believers. Omniscience also gives trouble, since it leads to the idea that god's ways are inscrutable to human minds. We cannot claim lack of visible action by god as a sign that he does not exist, since his motive and reason for doing so need not be accessible to us.

Logic in general inflicts compulsions and limitations on things; psychology describes motives and thoughts in ways drawn from the human psyche. Neither seem adequate for discussion of omnipotent, omniscient, eternal beings.